WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 1584634

BBC News iPad app re-done in HTML5

66 points| jamesgpearce | 15 years ago |whitherapps.com | reply

36 comments

order
[+] jacquesm|15 years ago|reply
Anybody that plans a business on a mobile platform based on app sales should take note of this, even if it isn't there yet I really think that it is the future. We've already seen this movie before, and if google docs is possible on a desktop/laptop + serverfarm you really have to wonder how long it is going to take before history repeats itself and 'apps' will go the way of a large number of desktop applications that are now 'web-apps'.
[+] maxklein|15 years ago|reply
You forget that 'apps' started off as web-apps in the first iphone, and neither the users nor developers liked them, so the SDK was released.

The future lies in thicker clients, particularly for mobile where the internet is not as assured as on a desktop.

[+] revicon|15 years ago|reply
Looking at the way the proxy was created on the Nginx server, it seems he's created an open http proxy that's asking to be abused. Anyone could make a curl request to that /apps/bbc-news/proxy uri and pass whatever URL they wanted to hit via the x_bbc_url http header. Doing this, any request they make would appear to come from the whitherapps.com (or whatever) domain. I can see the 4chan guys having a field day with this posting spam to boards their own IPs have been banned from. Seems like the server should only allow http proxying to a white list of domains, or better yet, a white list of urls.
[+] jamesgpearce|15 years ago|reply
Yeah - you're right... I hadn't expected this little experiment to hit Hacker News in quite the way it did, so the proxy is getting locked down.
[+] shortformblog|15 years ago|reply
You've gotten pretty far with this, and for that it's worth commending. Nice job. I look forward to seeing a polished version of this. You should offer it up to the BBC. :)
[+] jamesgpearce|15 years ago|reply
Thanks. Stay tuned. I'm actually waiting for a Cease & Desist letter from them ;-)
[+] alexbosworth|15 years ago|reply
Html5 on the ipad is still wishful thinking by people who don't want to bother being an ios developer. This demo is clearly worse than the BBC app and i have yet to see an ios web app that doesn't feel hacky and make me wish for a native version.

In a couple generations when mobile CPUs are faster and ipads have more than 256mb of ram, we will see a repeat of the web app takeover that occurred on the desktop.

[+] InclinedPlane|15 years ago|reply
It's not expected to be the same quality as the BBC app, it's a demo. More precisely a proof of concept. The message here is that if the BBC spent as much money making a high quality "mobile" html5 version of their site as they spent on the iPad app they would have just as good an end user experience with a lot fewer issues. For one you save all the money it takes to get an app into the app store (remembering that developer time and effort == money). For another you get the benefit of supporting more platforms instantly, iPad, iPhone, netbooks, android phones, etc.
[+] raquo|15 years ago|reply
> we will see a repeat of the web app takeover that occurred on the desktop

Desktop apps are not like iOS apps. They don't have very easy purchasing/billing built-in, they have to be downloaded and installed in a weird way (very few of my non-geek friends can install anything except apps on their iPhones), and they cost a fortune.

Apple will be doing a good job of maintaining AppStore the easiest option for both users and developers, and, well, people tend to use the easiest option.

[+] einarvollset|15 years ago|reply
Amen. I am more than a little sick of people opinionating about the greatness of all things HTML5 when they've clearly never tried to develop anything for either Android or iPhone, but simply wish that their existing experience directly translates.

If you're downvoting, please shoot me an email with your html5 mobile app to prove me wrong: [email protected]

[+] jcollins|15 years ago|reply
I just happened across http://abcnews.go.com the other day on my iPad and thought it was fairly well done and the page turn animations were decent. Check it out.
[+] jamesgpearce|15 years ago|reply
It's an ongoing series... yes, it rough right now, but I'm pretty sure I can make it equivalent - to the pixel - to the app.

In fact the only real challenges are scrolling (since Safari has a strange opinion on overflow:scroll) and embedded video (because the BBC is using some native iPlayer approach, as far as I can see).

Otherwise, my expectation is that a few 100k of HTML5 will be hard to distinguish from 6Mb or so of app. If you have a capped data plan, that might be, er, good news...

[+] fortes|15 years ago|reply
I love this type of stuff. The project I'm working on right now is all about having a better experience than the iPad magazine apps, while using HTML/JS instead of proprietary tech.

Here's a video demo of some of the layout, for the curious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt2iJZGqMpw

[+] daleharvey|15 years ago|reply
I was surprised when I was checking caniuse.com today that cross origin requests were supported pretty much across the board.

Is there a reason you couldnt use them? http://caniuse.com/#feat=cors

[+] jamesgpearce|15 years ago|reply
The server needs to know what to do with them. Since I am only writing a client here, I can't do the server-side piece of the preflight checks etc

Also the service needs to have a particular user-agent to work, so the proxy doubles up as a rewriter for that.

[+] abbetts|15 years ago|reply
Html/js is good for some UI parts of an app but eventually makes one yearn for native threading/locking, queueing, posting notifications, for that last 10-20% of code.